Taking a stand against oil pipeline

ENERGY

Updated 10:49 pm, Wednesday, October 17, 2012

Julia Trigg Crawford stands near a neighbor's property where TransCanada continues work on a pipeline.

Julia Trigg Crawford stands near a neighbor's property where TransCanada continues work on a pipeline.

Photo: Tony Gutierrez, Associated Press

Image 2 of 2

SWCA Environmental Consultants employees, left rear, conduct a archaeological dig as Julia Trigg Crawford, right, takes photographs while talking with TransCanada Field Coordinator Rudy Pavlina, center, Thursday, Oct. 4, 2012, in Sumner, Texas. The dig is being conducted on property belonging to the Crawford farm that the family is n dispute with TransCanda over. Oil has long lived in harmony with farmland and cattle across the Texas landscape, a symbiosis nurtured by generations and built on an unspoken honor code that allowed agriculture to thrive while oil was extracted. (AP Photo/Tony Gutierrez) less

Sumner, Texas -- Oil has long lived in harmony with farmland and cattle across the Texas landscape, a symbiosis nurtured by generations and built on an unspoken honor code that allowed agriculture to thrive while oil was extracted.

Texans have long welcomed the industry because of the cash it brings to sustain agriculture, but they also see its presence as part of their patriotic duty to help wean the United States off "foreign" oil. So the answer to companies that wanted to build pipelines has usually been simple: yes.

Until TransCanada entered the picture. As the company pursues construction of a 1,179-mile-long cross-country pipeline meant to bring Canadian tar sands oil to South Texas refineries, it is finding opposition in the unlikeliest of places: oil-friendly Texas, a state that has more pipelines snaking through the ground than any other.

In the minds of some landowners approached by TransCanada for land, the company has broken the code.

Nearly half the steel TransCanada is using is not American-made, and the company won't promise to use local workers exclusively; it can't guarantee the oil will remain in the United States. It has snatched land and behaved like an arrogant foreigner.

To fight back, Texas landowners are filing and appealing dozens of lawsuits, threatening to further delay a project that has already encountered many obstacles. Others are allowing activists to go on their land to stage protests. Several have been arrested.

"We've fought wars for it. We stood our ground at the Alamo for it. There's a lot of reasons that Texans are very proud of their land and proud when you own land that you are the master of that land and you control that land," said Julia Trigg Crawford, who is fighting the condemnation of a parcel of her family's 650-acre Red'Arc Farm in Sumner, 115 miles northeast of Dallas.

Oil and agriculture have lived in peace in part because a one-time payment from a pipeline company or monthly royalties from a production rig can help finance a ranch or farm that struggles today to turn a profit from agriculture. The oil giants also respected landowners' fierce Texas independence, even sometimes drilling in a different yard or rerouting a pipeline to ensure easy access to the minerals below.

TransCanada is different. It has more often sought and received court permission to condemn land when property owners didn't agree to an easement.

"This is a foreign company," Crawford said. "Most people believe that as this product gets to the Houston area and is refined, it's probably then going to be shipped outside the United States. So if this product is not going to wind up as gasoline or diesel fuel in your vehicles or mine, then what kind of energy independence is that creating for us?"

Activists have handcuffed themselves to machinery. A group has moved into a grove of trees on a TransCanada easement. On Monday, eight others were arrested for their protest activities.

Most pipeline projects in Texas have been completed with an average of 4-10 percent of condemned land. TransCanada, however, has condemned more than 100 of the 800 or so tracts - or about 12.5 percent - of the land it needed to complete a 485-mile portion of the pipeline that runs through Texas.

The Texas Supreme Court recently ruled if a landowner challenges a condemnation, the company must prove its project is for the public good.

Crawford, whose family has denied other pipelines access to their land, argues that since TransCanada's pipeline will have only one access point - or a place where oil can get into the pipe - at a hub in Cushing, Okla., it does not qualify for the status, which requires the pipeline be accessible in Texas.

"This is not about the money," said Crawford, who notes that TransCanada's final offer of $20,000 amounts to less than $1 a day over 60 years, less time than her family has been on the land. "This is about the right of a landowner to control what happens on their land."

David Dodson, a TransCanada spokesman in Houston, said the company has agreements with 60,000 landowners in North America, hundreds of them in Texas.

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